Chart o’ the Day: Casualties of the Knowledge Economy

A remarkably stark employment picture in the New York Times graphic below – the recovery and early phase of the new Knowledge Economy has not been kind to non-college graduates at all.

College graduates are currently experiencing an unemployment rate of 3.9% – as it good as it gets for the entire workforce even in an expansion. For everyone else, however, the environment has been brutal. Even the new so-called Manufacturing Renaissance jobs require higher education and some technical skills as they revolve around engineering and software more than handiness with tools or brute strength.

Conversely, college-educated kids are coming out of school to find openings only for positions that are below their abilities in many cases.

Check this out:

From the related article:

The number of college-educated workers with jobs has risen by 9.1 percent since the beginning of the recession. Those with a high school diploma and no further education are practically a mirror image, with employment down 9 percent on net. For workers without even a high school diploma, employment levels have fallen 14.1 percent.